Comment Policy
Offensive, harrassing or baiting comments will not be tolerated and will be deleted at my discretion.
Comment spam will be deleted.
Please leave a name and either a valid web-site or e-mail address with comments. Comments left without either a valid web-site or e-mail address may be deleted. Atom Feed LiveJournal SyndicationLOLcats feed
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
I Hate They They Don't Even Give Me The Chance To Spoil It
So, Marvel once again decided that the best place to reveal a "significant" comic book event is in the press on new comics day, rather than, you know, letting readers find out for themselves when they go to pick up their books. I know that moves like this aren't really in the interests of their reader base, but more of an attempt to up their profile in the general public, and maybe spur a little speculator interest into the death of Captain America along the way. Which annoys me as a comic fan, but I can appreciate Marvel's mercenary streak in a sick sort of way.
I suppose from a story-telling perspective there's something that can be wrought from this. Given how ham-fisted political metaphor has been in Marvel books of late, though, I doubt that anything interesting can come of this. I mean, other than the spike in sales when they undo this a little bit down the road. Call me cynical if you must, but I just don't see a death like this sticking, not with such a central figure. This isn't Blue Beetle. Everybody already expects this "Ronin" character to turn out to be Steve Rogers anyway, and they already have an "out" with the missing Nick Fury and his Life Model Decoys. The question that most readily comes to me about this, however, is why is an event of this significance occurring in a tie-in book, and not the Civil War book proper? Oh, yeah, right, the never-ending cross-over cycle and Marvel's desperate need to appear successful to investors by using gimmicks to inflate their sales to the direct market.
On a semi-related note, I'm calling for a Memory Hole Watch on the announcement that The Initiative is going from a mini to an on-going. Because when it gets cancelled, sometime around issue 10 or 12, I fully expect to see someone at Marvel describing it as a mini.